One of my formative experiences in terms of thinking about implementing CRM systems occurred as a result of visiting Nissan’s car manufacturing plant in Sunderland in the early ‘90’s. Nissan Motors Manufacturing UK Ltd is the UK’s largest car manufacturing plant and the most productive in Europe, as measured by Continue Reading

In my last post I was lamenting the absence of a focus on business benefits in many of the business requirements documents I get to read. Joel Spolsky echoes that point in a recent post albeit in a slightly different context: “Don’t start a business if you can’t explain what Continue Reading

Continuing the walk through of a CRM project started in ‘Anatomy of a CRM project – part one’: Our original intent had been to include the support and service functions as part of the phase one deployment, but thankfully both we and the client concluded that this was probably biting Continue Reading

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, I want to walk you through a CRM project to give some feel for what we do, and why we do it – and, because it is a real project, some feedback on how things actually played out. By way of background, this project Continue Reading

Keep It Simple Stupid….is always something I’ve tried to do (though the extent to which I’ve succeeded or not may be rather more moot). One of the goals for undertaking this blog was to communicate ideas, thoughts, and concepts about the CRM industry in a way that those from outside Continue Reading

There was an interesting article in the 5th December edition of BusinessWeek entitled ‘Shaking up Oxford’. It detailed the major challenges faced by John Hood, the new vice chancellor, in shaking up Oxford University to improve its standing in the global league of top universities. Echoing the entry I made Continue Reading

I met with a client a couple of weeks ago. Four years previously they had invested a decent six figure sum in an implementation of CRM technology. As time passed the system steadily fell into disuse, and the company wanted to review the best way forward. The software they had Continue Reading

Interesting conversation last week. One of our clients had recently lost a couple of key sales staff. Since they don’t have a big sales team, this represented a reasonable proportion of their sales capacity, and had the potential to be highly disruptive in the countdown to their year end. When Continue Reading

Reading through a book called ‘Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams’ by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister I came across the following quote: ‘If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks Continue Reading

One of the things that has struck me over the years is how few organisations spend any great time defining and documenting their requirements for a CRM system before plunging into the frenzy of vendor selection. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same organisations have struggled to realise Continue Reading